16.4.17

A Film a Week - Things to Come / L'avenir

It
is fair to say that Isabelle Huppert is one of the best living
actresses in the world and 2016 was her year. She had not one, but
two impeccable roles in critically acclaimed films. Paul
Verhoeven’sElle got her Golden Globe and Oscar
nomination, but her work in Mia Hansen-Løve’sThings to
Come is as good. It is a masterclass in acting. And too bad
Things to Come is not a better film.

Still,
most of the film critics simply loved it, praising its sense of time
passing, all the right questions asked, subtlety and gentle touches,
which all cemented the status of Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden)
as the golden girl of new French cinema. Maybe it is just my problem
with Hansen-Løve and her story-telling consisting mostly of
everyday, mundane events almost without any kind of accents that
would highlight the importance. Or it is just the lack of dramatic
structure, except the flat storyline, that rubbed me the wrong way.
And considering subtlety, can a film be too subtle for its own good?

On
paper, it sounds interesting, though. Our protagonist is a middle
aged philosophy teacher and textbook editor Nathalie, played by
Huppert with her trademark mix of expressiveness, distance and
sense of humour. And we get to see her in the year her comfortable,
somewhat bourgeois life takes a turn in a series of bad luck moments.
She has to deal with her demanding mother (veteran Edith Scob)
almost on daily basis, first her depression and then her death. With
all the changes and the imperative of simplification, her editorial
work is also at stake and Nathalie is a bit of a dinosaur for not
accepting to dumb down the philosophy so it could be more attractive
to the masses. On top of that, her husband’s (Andre Marcon)
midlife crisis results in him moving out with his new girlfriend, but
on a more positive side, her favourite
student Fabien (Roman Kolinka) gets back to her life.

The
only good thing Hansen-Løve
does is refusing to take the story in the trendy offbeat-artsy
direction. The “passion” Nathalie and Fabien share is for
philosophy and wisdom, their relationship is respectfull and strictly
cerebral. The age difference between them is evident in their
conversations about books they read, radicalism and action, and that
is one of the highlights of the film.

The
problem is that, on any other level, Things to Come packs
absolutely no punch and that is a deliberate decision. We have a
great actress playing a woman whose life comes crashing around her,
but we get no sense of it. Her existence or even her lifestyle is
never an issue. She feels sorry she will never come to her husband’s
summer house on the seaside. She feels stuck with her mother’s cat.
She suddenly got some freedom she doesn’t know what to do with, and
that is all of her trouble. She is not even sure if she wants
“someone” in her life. It feels like a walk in the park but we
know it is not all that simple. We are waiting for something to
happen, to converge to something, for things to come somewhere,
but...

There
are some nice touches, though. Camera-work is great, feeling fluid
and drifting to nice little details. The selection of books shown or
talked about is great. Name-dropping from Žižek (whom Nathalie
describes as “fishy”) to Unabomber is astonishing. And Isabelle
Huppert is brilliant as always, she is enjoying playing her
character and we are enjoying watching her doing so. But is it
enough? Things to Come pretty much comes to nothing.